Author One on One with Lorrie Moore and Marian Palaia

Photo credit: Linda Nylind

Photo credit: Kelly Rae Daugherty

Lorrie: You have an unusual job history for a female novelist: bartender, logger, truck driver. Were you writing all the way through these other jobs? Do you remember the early thrill of just starting out writing stories? Or did you begin with poems? (I love the phrase “begin with poems” because it really irks poets.)

Marian: Oh, yeah. I was always writing, always beginning stories. I have hundreds of first lines, or paragraphs, written in journals, spoken into a small tape recorder that I used to carry around with me and these days carry in a file on my computer. If anything were to happen to me and someone were to listen to the tapes from that recorder, any inkling that I might have been a bit “off” would definitely be confirmed. I did write poems and song lyrics early on, like in high school. I still remember some of them, and they were pretty terrible. I never got any better at poetry, except for this thing they let you do called “prose poems,” which I love, but mostly I think poetry is best left to people who can actually write it. I am sort of in awe of those people, that compression.

Lorrie: Clearly The Given World was not meant to be a cheerful book, but there is quite a lot of sneaky humor in it, particularly in the dialogue and Riley’s reflections on certain situations, like jail. How deliberative were you in including humor in this tale? Doesn’t it just come naturally to both the given world and the “ungiven” world?

Marian: I definitely think it comes naturally to some people, though I have read more than enough humorless fiction or fiction that takes itself too seriously or fiction in which the humor seems deliberately, often clumsily, added on. I am against this. I am not against darkness in writing (obviously, I suppose), but I do like to be let up, to be allowed to breathe once in a while. Basically, I think, it is a matter of creating fully realized characters and not taking ourselves as writers, or our ideas, too seriously. Even at the worst of times, or maybe especially at those times, humor is not just a good idea, it’s a necessity. I believe that you, Lorrie, know this, and write it, better than just about anyone.

Lorrie: There is a lot of bad behavior in this book, and there are a lot of wounded people. What is your opinion about the juxtaposition of these things with the rest of the book?

Marian: I am so glad you noticed that there is a “rest of the book.” Many responses I’ve seen, to Riley and to the other characters in the book, focus primarily on the drugs and the drinking, and there is definitely a sense that these things somehow negate the good that is inherent in these people. The whole point of Riley’s journey is that it is a journey, from light to darkness, and back to (or at least toward) a different kind of light. People get wounded. People struggle. People are flawed, but they keep trying, and some of them die trying. And sometimes they meet each other along the way, and they try to help each other out in the only way they can, or the only way they know. These will always be the people I want to write about, because otherwise, why bother?

Lorrie: There seems to be some peace at the end of the book for Riley, but there is also something she says in the final scene, about how she figures everyone has had enough of war by now, that maybe we’re done with it. The scene takes place in the late 1990s, and we all know what is coming in a few years. How important is it to you that this is one of the final observations in the book? What do you want your readers to take away from it?

Marian: It’s incredibly important, and I wish I could have found a way to highlight it more without ruining the scene. But I couldn’t, so some people will see it, and some won’t. I think a lot of us felt, around that time, that maybe war was a thing of the past, at least for us. Or even if we weren’t thinking about war at all, that was the point: it just wasn’t on our radar. In a very huge and critical way, this is really messed up, because there was at the time, and before that time, and has been since, plenty of conflict going on around the world, for other people, but most of us weren’t really noticing, because we didn’t have to. And then war came to us, and then we noticed, and then we responded, and now look. Now look. Many of us still aren’t noticing—though we paid attention for a while, and we pay a sort of attention when a movie like American Sniper comes out. But we don’t know or particularly care what’s happening over there, nor do we care, when those men and women come home, what happens to them and the people who love them and end up burying them or taking care of them, because we don’t have to. That is seriously messed up. So I guess what I want readers to take away from that observation and from the book itself (though I do realize this is asking a LOT) is that we should be paying better attention. If we did that, maybe we wouldn’t be so eager to go make the bastards pay, because in the long run everybody pays, whether we like it, or know it, or not. And every single time, the people who pay the most are the ones who can least afford it. I guess this was my small attempt to humanize some of those people, to make them real—real enough to be cared about, despite their flaws, and their choices, and their bad, bad behavior.